MV Life Mobile App

The City of Mission Viejo has a mobile app called “MV Life” live in both the Google and Apple app stores, serving as a digital touchpoint between the city and its community. They came to Sembit needing a set of changes: removing a complex, buggy Augmented Reality feature, replacing proprietary fonts with free alternatives, removing a weather function that wasn't very useful, improving hard-to-interpret analytics, and restoring push notifications for news updates that had stopped working.

A thorough code review revealed that the codebase was actually more than four years out of date. It was tied to an old version of Flutter, and some of the libraries it relied on were no longer supported, meaning the requested changes sat on top of a foundation that first needed to be brought up to date.

Sembit updated the app to the latest version of Dart and Flutter, updated the libraries as far as possible, swapped in different libraries where the old ones were no longer supported, and fixed hundreds of compatibility and compiler errors from the update process along the way. The team replaced the proprietary fonts with similar free fonts and removed the AR and Weather features the City no longer wanted.

To simplify future releases, Sembit set up automated builds of the app integrated with both stores. The team also diagnosed the broken push notifications, tracing the problem to an old way of calling into Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging service, for which Google ended support in July 2024, and provided detailed recommendations for using a more up-to-date Drupal module in the City's CMS to send push notifications. For analytics, Sembit traced the existing implementation and produced documentation and links explaining what the City already had and how to access the data they cared about, which turned out to be exactly what they needed.

Two months after the kickoff meeting on September 13, 2024, updated and tested versions of the apps were released to the public in both stores on November 13, 2024. City staff have been pleased with Sembit's work to make the app maintainable and resolve its most pressing problems, leaving Mission Viejo with a modernized, supportable app and a smoother path for future releases.

Mission Viejo's previous support vendor was overseas, which resulted in communication challenges. Having an onshore development partner simplified the communication process and shortened lag significantly.

From the start, Sembit showed a high level of professionalism. Every interaction was courteous and respectful, making the collaboration smooth. Your technical expertise was clear throughout the project, and I appreciate how you handled the existing codebase.

Communication was another strong point. You kept us informed at every stage, so we always knew the project's progress. Your clear and timely updates gave us confidence that everything was on track.

We were also impressed with your ability to deliver quickly, even when faced with roadblocks or unknowns. Meeting deadlines is important to us, and your team's commitment to timeliness ensured that our app released before Google's deadlines.

MV Life shows how a focused maintenance engagement can become a full modernization that pays off quickly. By bringing an out-of-date codebase up to the latest Dart and Flutter, removing unwanted features, automating builds, and pinpointing the cause of the push-notification issue, Sembit gave the City of Mission Viejo a reliable, future-ready community app, delivered to both app stores in just two months.